Nobody knows why John Milton’s first wife left him in 1642 after only a few weeks of marriage. Perhaps the fact that the 33-year-old writer was twice the age of Mary Powell had something to do with it. Whatever the details, this bad match may have planted the seeds for the finest prose work of Milton’s career.
Today, Milton is best known for “Paradise Lost.” Long before writing that epic poem about the fall of man, however, he was a polemicist who participated in the political controversies of his day. One of them involved the rules of matrimony, and shortly after his separation from Mary, Milton penned several tracts in favor of permitting divorce due to incompatibility. This idea shocked many Puritans, and one clergyman said that Milton’s pamphlets were “deserving to be burnt.”
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